Reporting and opining upon political and scientific occurrences of interest to me, The Phantom.
This is my soapbox, and I'm standing on it.

Tuesday, August 01, 2017

When 'banned' isn't, and 'invasion' isn't either.

Once upon a time,
The Phantom started getting his comments deleted on a blog. This is not
surprising, I get my comments deleted all the time. Always on Lefty sites like
Ms., Vile770, or The Mary Sue. They just love them some censorship, those kids.

This time it was Camestros Felpatron, mostly famous for being
banned at According
to Hoyt and Mad Genius Club for idiotic trolling. MGC usually
lets him have a few free ones before they shut him down, but he's been sent to
sit in the corner quite a few times.

Anyway, because I dared suggest the Holy Temperature Record might be a bit dodgy,
good old Floppy started deleting me. Which is fine, its his blog.

Every once in a while, he posts something so egregious that
I drop a comment in his spam filter, because I know he reads them. This is
where 'banned' isn't really banned. Sometimes he makes blog posts out of them.

I don't blame him, really, the Leftosphere is all Trump all the time these days.
There's only so many post you can make out of astrologers portending Trumpian doom before is
all begins to seem a little pointless.

This brings us to the 'invasion.' It seems it has become populat in certain Lefty circles to
refer to the settlement of Australia as an "Invasion." The Floppy One posted about it here.

This is the typical Leftist wordplay, when they substitute the word for
"invasion" for "settlement" because it makes victims out of
the Aborigines, or the Indians, or whatever group they are trying to claim
victim status for.

This balderdash culminates with:

"To accept that the events 1770
and 1788 amounted to an invasion would require them to accept that modern
Australia owes a debt to the people whose land was taken."

My comment, which was of course deleted because
inconvenient:

“Australia owes a debt to the people
whose land was taken.”

Those people died a long time ago. Nobody stole from the ones alive today.

By the way, where are my reparations for the Highland Clearances? I’m sure
somebody owes me a bundle, by your reckoning.

For those not up on their history, the Highland Clearances
were land seizures, where they basically took farms and kicked off the people
living there. The Scottish people were dispossessed and scattered across the
world.

I'm pure blood Scots on both sides of the family. I've never
seen Scotland. As a mater of both moral and legal principle, nobody owes me any
money for the Highland Clearances. The End. Any effort top cast -me- as a
victim of that two hundred and someth9ing year ago crap would be farcical.

What happened in Australia (and Canada, New Zealand, most of
the USA except the West, and other places,) wasn't a war. It was a migration.
Europeans moved to North America and started farming.

Where is something like that happening right now... oh yeah.
Europe! People from the Middle East are "migrating" to Europe in
their millions. You don't dare call that an invasion, do you?

Wherein Mr. Floppy tries to make a
case that the British Crown owes money to the Aborigines of Australia because
the British Crown stole their land, which somehow destroys capitalism.

Really, it is idiotic. He's got the
magic of inherited blood in there, Capitalism, inheritance taxes, some Scottish
tenant farmer guy killed himself, and Conservatives are stoopid. At the end he
comes out with Thomas Paine's Agrarian Justice:

Agrarian Justice essentially argued for a kind of Universal Basic Income
funded by inheritance tax. The moral justification being one based on notions
of property and justice.

Having not read the book I can't say
for certain, but I think Mr. Paine was more concerned that people not die of
starvation from the Crown selling off the common land they were grazing their
sheep on. If the land is in use by the subjects of the Crown, then the Crown
should bloody well look after them when the land gets sold. In Feudalism, the
Crown has -responsibilities- to its subjects, right?

Essentially, "The Rich" of
Britain should pay me, The Phantom Foreigner, by way of inheritance tax.
Because my ancestors lost a war to the English. (It wasn't a war, but never
mind.)

But then, shouldn't the French be
paying for the Norman Conquest? And shouldn't the Swedes be paying for the
Viking raids? Shouldn't the Spanish be paying South America and Mexico? And
shouldn't the Italians be paying EVERYBODY because Rome took over the whole of
Europe? (I should be getting bucks from Italy because Hadrian's Wall!!!) Japan
should be forking over large for World War Two, right? That was practically
last week.

Oh, and shouldn't the Russian and
Chinese Communists be paying a shitlocker full of money for killing a hundred
million people in the 20th Century and taking over everything behind the Iron
Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain.

Yes, they should. Or, you know, not.

Because there is a place on Earth
where this kind of accounting has been taken to a high art. The Balkans. Those guys
remember every goddamn sheep that was stolen for a thousand years. They've been
doing war on each other off and on since Rome left. The Mooselimbs invaded at
some point and got sucked into the maelstrom, as we saw from the most recent
Balkan War. Ethnic cleansing from a three sided triangle of hatred that never
dies.

There's another place on Earth where
they keep score, the Middle East. You've got two kinds of Mooselimbs killing each other over
ancestral grievances, Christians getting killed because they're those pain in
the ass minority types (who were there first, but never mind) and then the
Jews, of course, who are "invaders" despite having been there longer
than the Xtians or the Mooselimbs. (The Jews are bad because shooting back is
cheating!)

On the whole, I think keeping track
of shit like the Highland Clearances and demanding restitution from the
descendants of those armies is a really, really bad idea and we shouldn't do
it. Otherwise we will get Syria and Sarajevo.

But practical matters
aside, what this really is down to is racism.
The Scots don't get reparations because we are White. We are successful.

We left the Highlands, moved to the
howling wilderness of North America, and Australia, and every other Godforsaken
shit hole the English could find to dump us, and now we OWN the place. Our
people invented the entire Modern world. Name a modern device or product, 80%
of the time it was a Scot that invented it.

What have the Mooselimbs invented
lately? Suicide bombers. The Aborigines? I can't think of anything. The
Indians? Nothing springs to mind.

Camestros Felpatron thinks that we,
the White people, the ones who work our asses off and invent everything, make
everything, do everything, should help the poor brown people because they are
just helpless victims and can't make it on their own.

That is racism. They fucking well can
make it on their own, and they do. All the time. The joke around here is that
the richest people in Ontario live on the Indian reserve. There are at least
five families there with ten-figure (billion) net worth. Oh yeah. Quite a few
Lamborghinis on the Reserve these days.

Now, all of the above is based on Group Politics.The Flopatron Conjecture fails even at the group level, because
Sarajevo, but where it really fails is when you cast aside these sweeping
inclusions and get down to individuals.

Really, lets talk about who, in particular, should be paying me, in
particular, for the Highland Clearances. Ultimately there is only one person
alive today that could even remotely be considered inheritor of that action.
That person is Queen Elizabeth. Did Liz order the Highland Clearance? Nope. Was
it even one of her family? Nope. She's a Windsor.

Did the English crown even order the Clearances? Nope. It was economic
forces. (And, hilariously, anti-Celtic racism. Those Celts, they're LAZY
y'know. Good for nothing. Not like good AngloSaxon stock.) The land owners went
broke, sold out, and the newcomers changed the type of agriculture. Everybody
forgets the same thing happened in England, just happened earlier.

So really, can we stick tottery, 91 year old Liz Windsor with this mess? No.

But she's rich! So lets stick her anyway. Make the rich pay. Hellz yeah.

What does the Queen owe me?I'm a Highland Scot! Family comes from the Highlands, for real.
I've never seen the place of course, but my great-great-great- seven freaking
generations ago Grandad had to leave the Homeland and break sod here in Canada,
because of whatever nightmare was happening to him at the time. We don't even
know what it was. I can't even remember his name. My mother does, if I need to
know I can ask her. But I better hurry up, Mom's 90.

I have zero connection to that time, that land,
those concerns. Can I legitimately demand restitution for those things that
drove Great-to-the-7th Grandad to flee? No. I don't think so. If the Queen
offered me some free money I wouldn't turn her down, but otherwise, I have zero
claim. It wouldn't be much anyway, her whole fortune divided among every
Scottish descendant nets me about a buck-fifty if I'm lucky.

Can some Indian guy here
in Canada claim restitution from me for a transaction his Great-to-the-7th
Grandadhad had with mine when the old Indian sold the farm to the old
Highlander? Because money did change hands at the time, the deeds and
papers still exist. My mother has the original deed for the family farm, duly
signed off by the Indian chief of the time. Do I owe that guy money? Especially
considering my Grandmother sold that farm when I was a tiny baby?

Because there are a bunch of "Indians"
around here (some of them are almost as Scottish as I am) claiming exactly
that. Every time they take it to court, they lose. In 2006 they resorted
to guns and burning shit down, and we had the Caledonia Unpleasantness. Eleven
years later, there's still a busted hydro tower beside the road where there was
supposed to be a suburban building project. Every time somebody sticks a shovel
in the ground around here, the extortionists show up with a crowd and try to
jack up the developers for money. Lately they aren't getting much play, since
the Department of Highways evicted them from the bridge on Highway 3.

Probably they'll burn
some more tires at some point, maybe torch the power station again, then more
extortion money will flow for a little while.

Funny to see Australia has the same problem.

Oh, and by the way.
Did the aboriginal inhabitants of these places that got 'invaded' by the
horrible racist British Empire get any-benefits-from being 'invaded?' Things like the Germ Theory of Disease, or
in the case of Australia, the wheel and agriculture? Indoor plumbing, and a
life expectancy better than 40? Beer? Railways and steam engines? Mail? Email?

No, they still live in
the Stone Age. Don't they? They don't have cars and stuff, right? Indians on
the reserve still live in longhouses, right? Sure they do. I was just over
there yesterday, I'm sure I saw a guy with feathers in his hair standing next
to a longhouse. Oh wait, that was a cigar-store Indian standing next to an
illegal cigarette shack. My mistake.

The Phantom

Scrub-update!Mr. Floppy has deleted the link to this rebuttal from his blog. Thereby showing the type of sportsmanship and fair play we have all come to expect from Puppy Kickers and Lefties in general. Classy!

Sam L., The Flopatron is famous for pointless nitpicking and convolutions of argument that have no real point. These two posts are fairly typical, as is the petulant comment deleting. He's never actually told me I'm banned, either. Seems to think its my job to keep him entertained.